Empire Falls (79 page)

“I come up with the
Lila Day
as far as Hilton Head, but they were laying over for a month or two, so I caught a bus to Boston, then another to Woods Hole, then the ferry to here,” he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “My duffel bag’s in a locker down at the wharf.”

“That’s
how
you got here, Dad,” Miles said. “You sort of left out the
why
.”

Max shrugged. “There some kind of law against a man visiting his son and granddaughter?”

Miles, who on many occasions would’ve voted for such legislation, had to admit there wasn’t any yet.

“I thought maybe I could cheer her up,” he said. Miles must have looked doubtful, because he added, “I
do
cheer people up sometimes, you know. There was a time when I even used to cheer your mother up, believe it or not.”

“When was this?”

“Before you were born,” Max admitted. “She and I had a lot in common there at the start.”

“And I spoiled it?”

“Well,” Max said thoughtfully, “you didn’t help any, but no, it wasn’t you. Not really.”

“What, then?”

His father shrugged again. “Who knows? I’ll tell you one thing, though. It’s a terrible thing to be a disappointment to a good woman.”

“I know a little something about that myself,” Miles admitted, since they seemed, for the first time ever, to have entered confession mode.

Max lip-farted. “What—Janine? She was born unhappy. There’s no comparing her and your mother. Give Grace anything to be happy about, and by God she
was
happy. If she’d met that woman’s husband first, instead of me, everything would’ve been different.”

Miles couldn’t help smiling. That had long been his own estimate of the situation, but even so he was surprised that his father had come to the same conclusion.

“ ’Course, then there would’ve been no you.”

“Not a tragedy.”

“And no Tick.”

Right, no Tick either.

“Well, I’d have missed the both of you.” Max was grinning at him. “Her especially.”

“If we walk up the street,” Miles said, glancing at his watch, “we can meet her bus. After that, you can buy lunch for the both of us.”

“You look like you could stand a good meal,” Max said as they rose from the booth. “How much weight you lost since I seen you?”

“I don’t know,” Miles said. “A lot, I guess.”

“You don’t have the cancer, do you?”

“No, just a kid. Some people worry about them.”

“You think you can hurt my feelings, but you can’t,” Max assured him, not for the first time.

As he and his father headed up the street, it occurred to Miles that the unlikely event he’d feared over thirty years ago had at last come to pass: his father had come looking for him on Martha’s Vineyard.

T
RUE TO HIS PROMISE
, Max
did
cheer them up. Tick had always enjoyed her grandfather’s company and he hers. Watching them together had always fascinated Miles, and now, belatedly, he began to understand their mutual ease. Like Miles, his daughter would point out Max’s offenses against hygiene, but her tone was different, and for the first time Miles saw that the same observation from him sounded more like a moral statement. Trailing behind was always an implied imperative—that Max should do something about it—that would, of course, provoke a man like his father to dig in his heels. When Tick said, “You’ve got food in your beard, Grandpa,” it was clear she was merely providing a service. If he
wanted
food in his beard, that was his business. When he said, “So what?” she just shrugged. Or, if what was stuck in his beard was particularly grotesque, like that morning’s crusted egg yoke, Tick would merely grab a napkin, instruct her grandfather to hold still and gracefully remove it, a gesture that never failed to make Max smile beatifically. His father, Miles had long suspected, was basically a lower primate. He enjoyed being groomed.

A few days after Max’s arrival, after Miles had walked Tick up the dirt lane to where she caught the school bus, he returned to the house and wrote his sleeping father a note saying he was spending the morning reading in the Vineyard Haven library, something he’d been doing since Tick got settled into school. It was a beautiful little building, and he’d find a quiet corner near Special Collections, read until he grew hungry, pick up a sandwich at a restaurant nearby and then return for as much of the afternoon as remained until school let out. Before long he knew the names of all three librarians, one of whom had confessed that she’d taken him for a professor or a writer researching a book. He’d smiled and told her no, he was by trade a short-order cook, but her remark burrowed deep because what she’d mistakenly imagined was indeed what he’d once hoped to be, and was preparing to be when Grace fell ill. He and Peter and Dawn had been the most talented writers on the literary magazine, and while those two had no more reason to think they’d end up writing TV sitcoms than Miles did to believe he’d graduate to flipping burgers at the Empire Grill, at least his friends now occupied the same quadrant of the galaxy they’d dreamed that they’d one day inhabit. But to be told, at forty-three, that he looked like what he’d meant to be only increased Miles’s sense of personal failure.

Here on the island, especially once Max showed up, it was impossible not to think of his mother, and the Grace he found himself remembering was still angry with him for betraying his destiny. Many days, only the sight of his daughter stepping off the bus, looking and acting more like her old self every day, had kept him from sinking into a profound depression. Thankfully, seeing Tick alive and well was enough to confirm his sense that his best destiny in life was as this child’s father.

Still, his feeling that his mother was resting uneasily in her grave caused Miles’s lie, on this particular morning, in the note he’d written to his father. Instead of driving into Vineyard Haven, he pointed the Jetta across the island toward Summer House, where he and his mother had stayed so many years ago. Though it was only a ten-minute drive from Peter and Dawn’s place, he’d never returned there, neither during the long winter, nor on the many vacations he and Janine and Tick had taken over the years. In fact, the first time they visited Peter and Dawn, he’d told Janine that Summer House didn’t exist anymore, lest she want to see it.

But it did exist, and as he drove through the village, virtually deserted in the off-season, the details flooded back over him. The Thirsty Whale, where he’d greedily devoured clams, was still a restaurant, but under another name and closed until Memorial Day. The village itself was somehow both larger and smaller than he remembered it. There were more buildings, and they seemed closer together, and the epic distance back to their cottage when he was sleepy and full of buttery clams wasn’t much more than a hundred winding yards.

The gate was down across the dirt road that wound up the bluff among the beach shrubs, so Miles had to park and walk. The main inn, with its sweeping, wraparound porch, was exactly as he remembered it, and so, too, the cottages below, their rose trellises already greening in the warmer weather. He quickly found the one they’d stayed in, the name “Sojourner” above the door, the strange word returning to him across the decades on a wave of memory. Peering in the dusty window at what had been his tiny bedroom, he half expected to see his mitt sitting on the nightstand where he’d left it. Indulging such nostalgic emotions made him feel more than a little foolish, and they probably would be of little use in explaining why he’d ignored the
NO TRESPASSING
sign at the gate. Still, having come this far, he decided to complete the journey, which meant following the path down to the beach. Here, too, the beach grass was greening up, spring here already in full stride, nearly a month ahead of central Maine. The beach itself was still deserted, so he sat down for a while where he thought his mother had spread their blanket, and studied a fogbank resting a couple hundred yards offshore. Whose ghost did he expect to encounter here, he wondered—his mother’s, or that of his boyhood self?

He didn’t become aware that the fog had moved in until he turned around and saw it had nearly engulfed the bluff, which now was visible only in vague, blurry outline. By the time he located the path again, the mist was so thick he was able to orient himself only by watching the ground at his feet, and once up the cliff he found “Sojourner” again by literally blind luck. From its front porch neither the main house nor the nearest cottage, where Charlie Mayne had stayed, was visible. As he rested there on the step—a grown man now, whether he felt like one or not—he realized it was Charlie Mayne’s ghost he’d come to commune with. Miles and his mother had left the island together that morning thirty years ago, returning to their lives in Empire Falls, and she now lay buried in the town cemetery. It was Charlie Mayne they’d left behind on the dock as the ferry steamed away, so of course it was appropriate that he should be here still. Even recognizing his face in the photograph of C. B. Whiting couldn’t change that. It was
Charlie Whiting
who lay buried up the hill from his mother, but
Charlie Mayne
was a different sort of man entirely, and it was he whom Miles wished to summon for questioning.

So when the man emerged through the mist and sat down next to him on the porch step, Miles looked him over carefully and saw that it was indeed clean-shaven Charlie Mayne and not bearded C. B. Whiting. Still elegant and silver-haired, Charlie had not aged at all, nor was there a bullet hole in his right temple from the day that other fellow took a pistol he’d purchased in Fairhaven down to the river with him.

When Miles saw the man’s familiar sad expression, he said, “My mother died, Charlie.” He didn’t want him to think she was inside “Sojourner” putting on her white dress so they could all go out to dinner.

Charlie Mayne nodded, as if to suggest that, of course, this is exactly what would’ve happened.

“She waited for you,” Miles said, when he didn’t speak.

“I meant to come. I wanted to.”

“Then why didn’t you?” Miles asked, having wondered for over thirty years.

“When you’re older, you’ll understand. There are things that grown-ups intend and
want
to do, but somehow just can’t.”

This explanation made Miles feel like a boy again, and when he spoke it was with a ten-year-old’s whine. “But you got steamer clams in a restaurant that didn’t even have them on the menu.”

“Well, steamer clams are different,” Charlie Mayne explained.

Which made Miles even more petulant. “You killed her,” he said. “You killed my mother.”

“No,” Charlie Mayne said. “I’m afraid your mother died of cancer.”

“How do you know? You weren’t there. You never came. You made her happy, then you broke your promise, and she died.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“What you said.”

“I tried.”

“No, you didn’t.” He was crying now, as he hadn’t since he was a boy, the kind of crying that did some good. “She never stopped waiting for you.”

“You’re wrong about that. She did stop. Don’t you remember? You’re the one who never forgot.” Charlie Mayne reached over then and tousled Miles’s hair.

When Miles looked down he saw he
was
a boy, that he’d never been anything else, that his life as a husband and father had been a dream. “I hate you,” he sobbed.

“And I you,” Charlie Mayne replied kindly.

“Why? I’m just a boy.”

“Because if it hadn’t been for you, your mother and I could’ve run away together like we wanted to. You were the reason.”

“It’s not true,” he cried, knowing it was.

“So, now do you see the way it really was?” Charlie Mayne nudged him. “You’re the one who killed your mother, not me.”

H
E AWOKE A MAN
, with no idea how long he’d slept on that crooked porch. The fog was still thick and there were voices in it, though he couldn’t tell where they were coming from. At first whoever was talking seemed to be over at the next cottage, but then the voices shifted in the direction of the main house.

“Probably just somebody fishing off the point.”

“In this?”

“It’s a beater with Maine plates. Who around here’s got Maine plates?”

After a while the voices receded, and Miles, embarrassed, walked quickly back to the Jetta. Another car was parked by the gate, but whoever it was had chosen not to block him in, so Miles did a three-point turn and headed toward home. Not just across the island, either, for he suddenly knew that his brother was right. It was time to return to Empire Falls, to his life. Better to be a man there, his “Sojourner” dream had shown him, than a boy here.

Max was standing in Peter and Dawn’s kitchen in his undershorts, scratching himself thoughtfully. “That was David,” he said.

“Who was David?”

“On the phone.”

“I wasn’t here when it rang, Dad.”

“I know,” Max said. “That’s why I’m telling you. David said to tell you the Whiting woman died yesterday. The old one, not the cripple.”

“Francine Whiting?”

“That’s right. Drowned.”

Miles had to sit down. “That’s crazy.”

“You don’t believe me, call your brother. I’m just telling you what he said.”

“Drowned?”

“In the river, he said. Call him back if you don’t believe me.”

Miles shook his head, trying to imagine the world without Mrs. Whiting in it. Who would keep it spinning? he wondered.

“Anyway, I should go back for the funeral,” his father declared. “You hear what I said?”

“Why?”

“Because you look like you didn’t.”

“No. Why would you go to her funeral?”

Max was grinning broadly now. “You never listen to me. Just ’cause I’m sempty don’t mean you can just ignore me, you know.”

“Why do you want to go to that woman’s funeral, Dad?”

“Because we’re related. The Robys and the Robideauxs. Like I been telling you. I bet you she left me a little something.”

T
HEY PACKED THEIR THINGS
that night and closed up the house next morning, having called Peter and Dawn about their change of plans. Miles also called Callahan’s, hoping to speak to his brother, but it was Janine who answered. “We’re on our way back, if that’s all right with you.”